It is the final business of literature to quicken the spirit of humanity and stir those noblest impulses that make us despise the mere grovelling life of those who have not learned the irony of _things_. We hide ourselves like guilty creatures among our dusty, dusty possessions, afraid to waste time for living and thought, and so the days and nights that should be ours pass and we enjoy them not. Only a few poets possess the days and nights, and even they know the sweetness of life mostly in sorrow. All literature is trivial that lacks this large relevance to human life, and so, in looking over the bulk of contemporary American literature, it is to be feared that neither charity nor policy can make it out to be very important. It is destitute of any of the spirit of genius, and it is for the most part merely a travesty of the small talk of the surface life of so-called “good society.” It nowhere touches upon the reality of human passion, existent under every mask of custom and artificial seeming of refinement, and its inspiration is evident in every hasty line--money and advertising. [Illustration] To be quite candid, could any other country boast such an utterly mediocre, uninspired group of literary artisans as is represented by the Scratchback Club of New York, which in its membership really furnishes all that passes for contemporary “American” literature in our periodicals? They show the intellectual and imaginative poverty of a people merely pushing and ingenious. They reveal the shallowness of the prevailing idea that mere education furnishes those deep forces of personality which have made all true literature, and all true cultivation, with or without education. There is none of the audacity of real spontaneous thought in these men and women’s work; it is all written to order, as mechanically as an auctioneer’s catalogue. But it is well to have a definite aim in literature, and the pens concerned in the production of the FLY LEAF are at least inspired by a sense of the fluidity of this excellent medium of prose, and though they may fail in the haste of periodical writing to achieve the perfect ends of art, at least they will not wantonly strive to debase the public judgment and taste by pandering to the narrow minds of ignorant prudes, after the fashion of the popular periodical literature of the day. The FLY LEAF has a definite aim and purpose in being, and that is, to get more latitude in literature written in English, and to make the work of the real writers of our end of the century better known to the great democracy of readers. These are the younger men and not the old, fogy carpenters, brought up to write moral tracts under Dr. J. G. Holland at the close of the fifties. The FLY LEAF looks to the younger generation to enable it to make its aims a force in our intellectual and literary life here in America.